Monetize your website

Ok. So you have a website. Your website contains content rich information about your topic. Now you want to make some money to help cover your costs, or send your third child through college. There are no shortage of ways to go about this. These next series of articles will outline the most popular ways.

You will need some skills, writing skills, marketing skills, and the ability to make yourself do something even when you don’t want to skills.

Once you have your site set up, and you have some content on your site, you will need visitors. You will receive visitors in a number of ways, including online and offline marketing, advertising, or just good organic SEO. You will need to track your visitors, and announce yourself. Create a Bing webmasters account, as well as a Google webmasters account.  Links are at the bottom of this article.

Part of the process of creating these accounts will require a sitemap.  A sitemap instructs the search engines to your site.  Sitemaps are XML files, so if you are not familiar with XML you will need to utilize a service.  XML Sitemaps dot com does a pretty good job for free up to 500 pages.  There is a link below.

It is a good idea to have your site map prior to creating your webmasters accounts, so start there.

Once you have created your webmasters account it will take a few days before they will provide you with any quality information about who is visiting your website.  Most importantly it will revel what search terms are being used on your website and where your site ranks for those given search terms.  You can use this information to tweak your search terms for better rankings.

A word about search terms.  Be sure your search terms are relevant to what someone might actually type into a search bar.  So, if you were to search on Michael Hewston, I would expect this website to come up first, which it does.  However, I need to put my ego aside and realize that no one whom I have not met knows me, or my name, or my website.  Remember that as you proceed.

This article outline the beginning steps to marketing your website online, including XML sitemaps, Big webmaster Tools and Google Webmaster Tools.

XML Sitemaps: https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

Bing: https://www.bing.com/webmaster

Google: https://www.google.com/webmasters